Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/138

 lettered body of functionaries, spread over the whole social body, and fixed in every locality, receives, and disseminates to the small groups of the population nnder their jurisdiction, the law, command, or will of the autocratic government, without that reference to the people which could not be avoided when all had to be convened in a Thing or assembly to hear the promulgation. The period in which the influence of the governed should have been made effective slipped by on the Continent, among the Anglo-Saxon race, without being used; and probably would have slipped by in England also, but for the recent admixture of a wilder, more ignorant, and more free people, in a great proportion of the island, who conld not even be oppressed without collecting them into Things, or Eolkmoths, to make known to them what they had to submit to. The very ignorance of the half pagan people of mixed or pure Danish descent who occupied so large a portion of the island at the Norman conquest, was the providential means of keeping alive that spirit of self-government in public affairs among the people, on which, and not on the mere forms of representative government, our social economy rests. The forms are useless without the life in the spirit of the people to animate them. France, and some countries of Germany, have got the moulds; but the stuff to fill them with is wanting in the people. We inherit this stuff in the national character from the great inter-mixture of the rude energetic Northmen, bred up in Things and consultations with their leaders, which took place during the Danish conquest immediately previous to the invasion of William the Conqueror; and in the generation immediately after his conquest this stuff began to show itself in fermentation, and worked out our present social institutions, and the spirit of our national character.

The lendermen, or tacksmen of the king's farms